Atlantic Environments and the American South ed. by Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Atlantic Environments and the American South ed. by Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson Tycho de Boer Atlantic Environments and the American South. Edited by Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson. Environmental History and the American South. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 226. Paper $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5669-3; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5648-8.) Atlantic Environments and the American South brings together contributions stemming from a 2016 symposium at Rice University that explored "the intersection of Atlantic, environmental, and southern historiographies" (p. 2). These fields, Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson explain in their introduction, "developed in response to specific contexts and certain questions that have largely forestalled cross-field pollination" (p. 2). Broadly speaking, the editors contend that historians of the Atlantic world have not sufficiently centered the environment in their "multivalent, sociocultural histories" of slavery and empire; the history of American South, understood as part of a circum-Caribbean or a British Greater Caribbean, provides a useful geographic lens through which to view that central role (p. 3). The collection does not propose a paradigmatic approach to such an intersectional history. Instead, its sections—"Slavery and Climate," "Slavery and Landscape," "Empire and Infrastructure," "Empire and Expertise"—suggest more nuanced understandings of the ways different peoples, rival empires, and competing epistemologies interacted with one another and with different, shifting environments to shape [End Page 326] the American South as both a distinct region and a node in the networks of exchange that constituted the Atlantic world. Bradford J. Wood, for example, argues in "Ocean Graveyards and Ulterior Atlantic Worlds: The Experience of Colonial North Carolina" that our axiomatic understanding of "the Atlantic Ocean as a means of connection" does not apply to North Carolina, whose treacherous coastline prevented the colony from establishing those connections that drove large-scale environmental change elsewhere and gave rise to the concept of a larger, interconnected Atlantic world (p. 113). Frances Kolb shows in "Profitable Transgressions: International Borders and British Atlantic Trade Networks in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1763–1783" that the Mississippi River, designated a boundary between empires, instead fostered multidirectional exchange and movement in the borderlands of the Lower Mississippi Valley, with small Indigenous polities known as petites nations rejecting exclusive loyalty to either Great Britain or Spain when it came to trade. Sean Morey Smith shows how authors promoting settlement in the British colonies relied on various theories regarding hot climates and health, not just the "old ideas of latitudinal climate zones," to hail the "salubrious" qualities of England's overseas possessions (p. 21). Elaine Lafay notes in her chapter how planters in the antebellum South concerned themselves with proper ventilation of their own dwellings and those of their slaves, yet resisted slaves' attempts to improve their drafty quarters or enjoy the "fresh air" they equated with freedom and autonomy (p. 38). Environmental aspects of planters' control over slave labor also inform Hayley Negrin's chapter on Native women, whose traditional roles in crop cultivation the English disparaged as uncivilized but whose labor they nonetheless sought forcibly to employ in their fields, and Keith Pluymers's chapter on Bermuda, where the sought-after expertise of Afro-Bermudians was crucial to the development of both tobacco cultivation and slavery. Melissa N. Morris highlights the importance of Spanish and Indigenous crops and expertise to the rise of Virginia's tobacco culture, further stressing the exchange of environmental resources and knowledge among diverse peoples and places within the circum-Caribbean. Matthew Mulcahy's chapter on drought challenges notions of this world as singularly hot, wet, and plagued by hurricanes and shows how droughts severely impacted island populations and often spurred slave resistance and rebellion. Peter C. Messer's closing chapter on "The Nature of William Bartram's Travels," while somewhat incongruous, nevertheless underscores this collection's useful contribution to the scholarship: just as the nature of the American Southeast resisted classification according to the rigid taxonomies of old and prompted William Bartram to evoke the sublime and make it known on its own terms, so do the essays in this collection suggest fresh new ways that environmental history can...